The proposed research is concerned with studying the development of certain aspects of event perception during infancy, an issue of relevance to developmental, cognitive and social psychologists. Specifically, this proposal will study what infants know about the lawful constraints imposed on events by gravity and temporal relations. Normal visual experience, even for infants, primarily involves dynamic relations among people, objects, self and the environment. However, there has been little empirical work assessing this perceptual process. The vast majority of research on perceptual development ignores event information which may be useful to infants, concentrating instead on the perception of static displays. In acknowledging the normal visual experience of infants, the current proposal seeks to study how infants at different cognitive and functional levels process event information which is available in visual experiences. To accomplish this aim, it is necessary to 1) specify the type of event information being offered to infants by different stimulus displays, and 2) devise measures which will allow us to assess whether infants vary developmentally in their ability to extract different types of event information. The current research will employ an event framework which defines classes and types of event information. Film sequences will be produced which depict specifiable event relationships, as defined by the theoretical framework. These sequences, showing both normal events and specifiable violations based on gravitational and temporal principles, will be shown to 4, 8, and 12-month-olds in order to determine what type(s) of event information is recognized and utilized by infants at different developmental levels. This methodology should help me determine how normal visual development progresses, thus allowing assessment of deviations from normality which could potentially indicate perceptual or cognitive deficits.